Life is complex: an ever-changing tangle of joy and pain, failure and success, beauty and despair. Sometimes it sucks, like watching your mother fade away into dementia, or losing a beloved dog. Sometimes it is so beautiful it brings you to tears, like dancing with soul friends under a sky set aflame.

These last three years have brought a different perspective on complexity — a lived experience of “the full catastrophe”. While I am even more convinced of the need to make the wisdom of complexity available more broadly, I am increasingly frustrated by how we "mystify" it with big words and theoretical constructs.

Complexity is not new. And it’s not something separate from our lives. We all already know how to be in, and navigate complexity.  We also have a uniquely human ability to create pockets of order and predictability. And while this has led to incredible progress, our love affair with certainty and control has become a trap. Now, the challenges of our times invite us to reconsider, to reframe our learned dislike for complexity and reconnect with our innate ability to be dance with it — or as Jennifer Garvey-Berger and Carolyn Caughlin calls it: our complexity genius.

The last three years has been an excellent teacher … I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned during these exceptionally hard times.

1.    You can’t avoid complexity (and you don’t want to).

We ARE complex beings, embodied as complex organisms embedded in webs of complex relationships. We know complexity in our bones. Yes, our need for certainty, comfort and control has led us to create elaborately ordered structures that provide comfort and a measure of predictability. But we all know that raising children is not like fixing a car.

Deep down, we know there is no certainty except for continuous change.

And while there is truth to it that change is happening faster and faster, we face potentially existential challenges (like intelligent machines), and life can feel precarious … it is also true that humans are creative and adaptive; we know how to dance with emergence. Trying to opt out of the uncertainty only ends up creating more. And if everything was sure, how boring would life be?

2. Complexity is everywhere, but not everything is complex.

Think more granularly, i.e., tasks, problems or challenges I encounter (vs systems). Some tasks are routine and straightforward — I can just get on with it, e.g., if a hose pipe or tap leaks in my garden, I fix it. Some tasks are more complicated, but I can figure it out or refer to someone with expertise — like installing an irrigation system. Nurturing a garden ecosystem, raising children, navigating the death of loved ones, forming new friendships … these require learning, improvisation, experimentation and for me to show up in my full (in)glorious human complexity.

3. Mind your language.

Language helps us frame our world and make sense. New language can help us see the world differently, AND it can become a stumbling block. So, if the language and labels become hindrances, drop them. I have become increasingly aware of how our language de-animates our world. The nouns that flow from our need to name and categorise can strip out life’s essential ambiguity, nuance, and mystery. Once I label a tree as a pine or a beautiful bird as a pigeon, they disappear into familiar categories. Only suitable for logging, a pest or a nuisance. I don’t bother looking twice; I miss the beauty and potential to be more. Many opportunities for innovation are lost because we can’t see past our definitions and spot new and unexpected affordances offered by familiar objects or processes. The same happens with people and relationships — they become imprisoned in rigid categories. So, instead of labels, see if rich descriptions help — it’s not about getting it entirely right or finding a suitable category — it’s about changing our relationship to the problems and systems around us.

4. Think of yourself as always waysfinding.

In familiar places, we find our way using familiar landmarks and pathways. In unfamiliar places where others have gone before, we follow a map, a GPS or someone’s storied directions. When we are in uncharted places where no one has been before, we follow our intuition; we look for patterns; we find co-journeyers and reconnect to ancient wisdom. Ironically, sometimes the best way to perceive the new is with forms of knowledge we deem outdated or irrelevant. The key to remember here is that we are always finding our way; our context determines how we do it.

5. Keep moment(um).

Complexity (or maybe we should just call it life) is constantly changing. It is dynamic, and so we need to keep moving. We move from moment to moment, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, always taking time to pause for an ‘um’ to catch our breath. Sometimes we encounter dead-ends and need to backtrack; sometimes, we will find unexpected beauty and tarry for a while. Sometimes it might seem like we are aimlessly drifting, but that’s ok too. The key is not to get stuck for too long.

6. Getting lost is a beautiful practice.

Have you noticed how we never allow ourselves to get lost nowadays? We always have a GPS or a charted route. Yet, we all know that the best way to really experience a new place, like a city we haven’t visited before, is to go off the beaten track and get lost for a while. So, in safe environments, I try to switch off my GPS more often to allow myself to get lost, drift through the landscape, and be open to the unexpected. This practice helps me reconnect with uncertainty to go beyond the certainty merchants. When I do this, my intuition comes online, dots connect, and new perspectives emerge. So instead of ruminating on that tough work challenge, allow yourself to get lost, let it simmer, and you may find unexpected paths forward. It might seem inefficient, but it’s often much more effective.

7. be COOL

·       Choose to be Courageous and stay with the trouble for a while — allow yourself to get lost;

·       Choose to be Open to the unexpected and the slightly messy and ambiguous;

·       Choose to Observe from different perspectives and to Observe yourself as the Observer and how you are part of it all; and

·       Choose Lightness — to see the beauty in it all, to not take yourself too seriously, to allow yourself some joy in the midst of it and to connect to your imagination.

8. be Human (again)

• Feel your feelings. Be curious. Laugh. Connect and value others. These are things AI can’t do.

• Learn to regulate your nervous system responses. Cultivate a breathing practice, reconnect with your body, and move more. Turn anxiety into creative energy.

• Don’t try to go it alone; find a tribe — but make sure it’s diverse. It’s the quirky ones, the mavericks among us, who can help us find new ways.

• Develop a strategic relationship with your intuition. There’s a reason Einstein said,

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

It’s high time we remember the gift.

So, finally … when I am stuck in a tangle or I feel overwhelmed, I try to remember:

• I’ve got this! Being human is about dancing with tangles — I’ve done it hundreds of times in many different contexts, and I can do it again.

• It might feel overwhelming, but there is always a way forward — pause, re-orient, and keep moving one small step at a time.

• I’m not alone. We are all walking each other home as we navigate the beautiful complexity and beauty of this life.

Innovation. It is a word that features on almost every list of values in the corporate world. It has long been a "holy grail" in business, and yet very few companies consistently get it right.  The word has become so hyped that it has almost become meaningless. For many, it is synonymous with breakthrough invention and perpetual novelty, creating the false impression that it is the domain of creatives or design thinkers, i.e. that only some people are able to innovate.  This in turn has led to “innovation units” or “business of tomorrow” spin-offs that create unhealthy "us and them" cultural dynamics in organisations.

The assumption that creativity is a necessary pre-condition for innovation has sparked lucrative industries focused on creativity and design thinking training and "creative disruption" processes to help people "think outside the box."   However, when one looks at stories of actual innovation, it becomes clear that creativity and innovation are sometimes related, but not always.  Both tend to emerge together when circumstances are conducive.  This means that catalysing innovation has a lot to do with the context and that we should therefore focus more of our design and leadership efforts on curating conducive environments.

This raises the question: what does a conducive environment look like? There is no single correct answer, but there are signposts and clues when we look at patterns in stories of innovation.

1. Being present, Open and Observant is key to innovation.

"There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery." – Jeff Bezos

Imagine Van Gogh's Starry Night without the beautiful deep blue sky. Suppose a color maker in Berlin didn't try to skimp on costs by using cheap ingredients to create a cochineal red batch. In that case, Van Gogh may never have had a stable synthetic blue pigment to paint with. Before the accidental invention of Prussian Blue, the only other options available to artists were either too expensive or unstable fast-fading vegetable dyes. Prussian Blue (named for its place of origin) became an instant sensation in the art world and fashion industries.

Similarly, microwave ovens came about because a radar technician noticed a chocolate bar melting in his pocket while working on a radar magnetron. And antibiotics were discovered because of a messy laboratory and a dirty petri dish.

From Penicillin to Prussian blue paint to Microwave ovens, many of the great inventions we take for granted today came about by accident.   Such serendipitous events or "happy accidents" can happen to anyone, even the most uncreative among us. However, we need to be present and aware so that we don't miss the opportunity when it presents itself. Suppose Alexander Fleming had simply washed his petri dish without paying attention to the dead bacteria inside. In that case, we might never have had penicillin.

How do we create conditions for noticing?

• Ensure there is sufficient slack in the system: our over-focus on efficiency has effectively eliminated all the slack or redundancy from our work contexts.  If people are rushing to meet unrealistic deadlines or drowning in work, they will not have the capacity to present or notice patterns or anomalies. Efficiency at all costs is the enemy of learning and innovation, yet it is so entrenched as a best practice that it takes courageous leadership to create the space for the inefficient slightly messy environment where innovation thrives.
• Encourage people to pursue learning in non-work-related fields. Steve Jobs' calligraphy classes were instrumental in Apple's famous design innovations. The more diverse knowledge people have to draw from, and the broader their networks, the greater the chances for serendipitous discovery.
• Increase the cognitive diversity in your teams, including neurodiverse people. We need the productive tension of different ways of seeing and thinking; otherwise, nothing new can emerge.

2. Curate the conditions for Courageous spontaneity, improvisation, and bricolage.

"Great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision". — Jake Knapp

Breakthrough innovations most often come from combining two ideas that everyone sees every day, but no one has put together (yet). — Gary Hoover

Innovation is not always about coming up with something completely new or novel. It is often a long slow evolutionary process of incremental improvement or adaptation. But there is another kind of innovation called exaptive innovation or radical repurposing: finding new or unintended functions for existing capabilities or products.

Exaptation involves a 'pivot' from one function to another without a lengthy and costly development process. It often happens during times of crisis, when we are forced to be resourceful (for more of this, see no 3). Think, for example, about the repurposing of dive masks as respirators when people were dying because of equipment shortages in hospitals during the pandemic.  We don’t need a crisis in order to enable this kind of innovation though.  Again we need the ability to notice, but we also need to curate contexts where our innately human abilities of curiosity, imagination, and playfulness can flourish.

Someone who exemplifies this kind of resourcefulness is the 1980s television hero MacGyver.  He was a bricoleur: someone able to construct or improvise something useful with whatever materials are immediately available.  Every episode challenged MacGyver to save the day, often armed with only a swiss army knife (or paper clip) and some junk lying around.  Granted, it wasn’t very realistic, but still inspiring!

Practical ideas to consider:

• Design interventions that force the spanning of organisational boundaries. Ideas for repurposing often occur when we encounter a need or a capability that exists in another area.  If we never cross the boundaries of our silo or community, we may never know what is available for repurposing.  One way that we are working with clients to achieve this is the creation of cross-silo learning pods where people from different teams learn together on our complexity fitness course.
• Often, people are inhibited by a perceived lack of permission to “be silly at work”. We can all be curious, imaginative, and playful, but unless we perceive it as acceptable, we will not.
• Encourage Lightness as a way of being.  Laugh together, play together, meet outside in nature instead of the office and appreciate beauty together.  We already use the language of play: we talk about playing with ideas, budgets, strategies, and scenarios.  It's time to start playing in the real sense of the word.
• Create budgeting policies that enable safe-to-fail experimentation. Repurposing (and other kinds of innovation) depend on the ability to try and learn.  Define what safe-to-fail means in your particular contexts and align budgeting and performance management policies to ensure governance systems don’t discourage innovation.

3. Never waste a good crisis.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste" – Sir Winston Churchill.

In a crisis, restrictive rules and old ways of doing things often fall away because of necessity. A window of opportunity opens up where things are possible that usually would not be. An excellent example is the extremely rapid transition to remote work at scale at the start of the pandemic. Organisations all over the world managed to shift entire workforces in 3 to 5 days without change management plans, special leadership interventions - “It just happened”.  People were trusted to figure out the best way to do things, and restrictive policies and processes fell away.  Innovation happened it had to.

Suddenly assumptions and policies about who could work remotely fell away, and we just made it happen.   Necessity is the mother of invention (as the saying goes).

According to Dave Snowden, time pressure, resource starvation, and a shift in perspective are pre-conditions for the emergence of innovation. A crisis forces us to find creative solutions to urgent or even existential problems.

A few years ago, Cape Town was in the unenviable position of being the first major city to face the unthinkable: "Day Zero" – the day the taps run dry. In the face of such a dire situation, everyone, from students in university labs to entrepreneurs and ordinary people, came up with innovative ideas and experiments to save water.

One Capetonian wrote this reflection in a Facebook post: "The conclusion I've come to is that convenience not only robs us of creativity, it makes us complacent and unaware. The inconvenience of running out of water has literally woken people up. Woken them up to how much they waste, and ingenious ways to save. The inconvenience of this crisis has woken us up to our creative potential to solve the problem".  

Thankfully the city managed to avoid Day Zero, and many of the innovations remain.

While it's not feasible to manufacture a crisis to stimulate innovation, we can make sure we prepare to make optimal use of that brief window of opportunity to do things radically differently.

• Make the deployment of an innovation team part of your crisis response planning. So when you deploy crisis response teams, other teams are deployed simultaneously, tasked with looking for opportunities to innovate.
• Document the decisions and actions taken during the crisis. These often spontaneous actions offer clues to removing barriers to innovation even in normal circumstances. We usually forget to document in the heat of the moment, so make this a formal role to ensure it gets done.

4. Don’t limit innovation to a unit or area, Open it up - democratise it.

Sometimes the best ideas emerge from people we wouldn’t normally pay attention to.  New joiners, who are able to see the company with fresh eyes, blue-collar workers who work “at the coal face”, call center agents who speak to clients all day long, and even janitorial staff who often know more about the actual company culture than HR does.  Instead of limiting innovation to a select few, create the conditions where ideas and communication can flow more easily: from the edges of the organisation, between silos, and even from the outside in.

Here are a few practical things you can think about doing.

• Instead of employing consultants when the need arises, co-create solutions internally. For example, when an urgent need exists to cut costs, involve the entire workforce in experimenting with new and innovative ways to save. This will save a lot of consulting fees and mitigate the risk of unintended consequences of implementing draconian top-down cost-cutting measures.
• Create a view of the organisation focused on flows, not things.  Organisation charts focused on units, roles and hierarchies often hide the flows that make the organisation work (or not).  Focus on finding barriers to flow and eliminating them.  These could be unhelpful policies, unfit structures, or cultural norms … a key role of leadership in complexity is to enable flow.

We in summary: to intentionally create the conditions for innovation focus on curating COOL environments where people are free to show up with Courage, Openness, Observing, and Lightness.  It may sound simple, but it runs counter to much of the prevailing business practice.  However, in today’s disruptive world, we no longer have a choice ...

... the waves will keep coming, we need to learn how to surf.

In the two decades that I have been working in the field of applied complexity, I have seen it go from an obscure academic term to something that pervades conferences, business magazines, and consulting offerings. However, very little embodies what complexity philosopher Edgar Morin would term "lived complexity."  

In a paper written in 2008, he asserted that a real understanding of complexity could only come from an internalised intersection of intellectual knowledge and lived practice. He warns against a split between theory and practice and what he calls pseudo complexity thinking: approaches and people who define themselves in opposition to linear reduction approaches but do not consistently live complexity. Pseudo complexity is especially pervasive in the consulting world, where too many consultants brand their offerings with complexity language. However, a reductionist paradigm that believes that we can fully know our reality and that we can map paths into the future definitively still informs their practices.   

"They display all the distinctly reductionist habits of expecting to come to "know" the problem and objectively find the "right" solution by dividing the problem into discrete elements to be tackled by experts who "know" how to do it. Any range of solutions can be tried because, if they go wrong, they can be reversed with little consequence for the system. They will expect, consciously or unconsciously, that once the "real" solution is found, the problem will go away, and they will now have an "evidence-based" decision that can be applied again should "the" problem emerge again. "(Rogers et al, 2013)

(A heuristic I often advocate to my clients: if anyone promises to "simplify" your complexity or "future proof" your organisation, you need to beware.)

This is especially problematic as the world needs practical ways of applying complexity thinking now more than ever. All is not lost, however, as all human beings already have a lot of lived experience in complexity, although we may not use that language. As we negotiate city life or traffic, or social complexities in families or friendships, especially as we raise our children, we effectively engage complexity. We also tend to forget these skills when we enter the workplace.

In a peer-reviewed 2013 paper I co-authored, we attempted to make explicit some tacit heuristics that we collectively cultivated over many years of working in complex systems. We framed them then as habits of mind. (Text in italics below is all from that article)

Habits of mind to thrive in complexity

"A habit of mind is a pattern of intellectual behaviour that leads to productive actions. Habits of mind are seldom used in isolation but rather in clusters that collectively present a pattern of behaviours."

We identified three inter-dependent habit clusters or frames that we consistently apply when navigating complexity. Almost a decade later, it is interesting to see that our thinking still holds and how these relate to our COOL meta-skills.  

1. Openness 

"Openness can be described as a willingness to accept, engage with, and internalise the different perspectives, even paradigms, to be encountered when dealing with diverse participants in an interdisciplinary situation. An open frame of mind requires conscious acceptance that notions such as ambiguity, unpredictability, serendipity, and paradox will compete strongly, and legitimately, with knowledge, science, and fact. In essence, it means that while navigating challenges of a complex system, one holds one's own strong opinions lightly (Pfeffer and Sutton 2006) and engages as both facilitator and learner. "

Some of the specific habits of mind/practices that promote patterns of openness include:

• Hold your strong opinions lightly and encourage others to do the same.
• Embrace emergence: Be prepared for the intervention of surprise, serendipity, and epiphany.
• Cultivate curiosity — learn to "stay in inquiry" and be curious (vs. assuming, judging, and jumping to conclusions)
• Value diversity: Encounter every person with equal respect, listen to and acknowledge their specific needs, knowledge, and ways of knowing.
• Set direction, but be open to not having specific goals or outcomes.
• Be open to both/and options.
• Expect ambiguity or paradox: Accepting these as legitimate can often avoid unnecessary conflict.
• Accept that consensus is often impossible in complexity, adopt an experimental approach rather than forcing agreement to a single approach or solution.
• Accept others as co-learners, not experts or competitors.

2. Situational Awareness (Observe in COOL)

"One of the critical differences between complexity-based and reduction-based thinking is the importance of context and scale in complex systems. Each issue or system attribute can appear quite different, and interactions have different outcomes under different contexts and scales. Spatial and historical context are very important, but so too are the different participants' value systems and how they lead to different outcomes. An awareness of the complex context in which an adaptive challenge exists and of how it changes in time and space is critical to effectively navigating through it. In essence, one must cultivate a state of anticipatory awareness and constant mindfulness."

Habits of mind/practices that promote patterns of situational awareness include:

• Consider the importance of relationships and interactions between entities, not just the entities themselves.
• Be aware of contingencies, scale, and history.
• Surface organising principles and values that bound decision situations and help keep decision-making consistent from one context to the next (vs. Setting rigid rules).
• Reflect often: formally, informally, individually, and collectively.
• Cultivate diverse feedback mechanisms and networks — avoid echo chambers

3. A healthy respect for, what we term, the restraint/action paradox. (Links to Courage in COOL)

"Leadership and decision making in a complex system constitutes a balance between the risks associated with practicing restraint and taking action. On the one hand, if the context requires it, one must consciously practice restraint and create space that allows the emergence of ideas, trust, opportunity, and even epiphany to loosen the tangled problem knot. There is a strong need for a certain slowness (Cilliers 2006) in taking time to allow emergence to unfold. On the other hand, one needs the courage to take action in a mist of uncertainty because, in a complex system, the consequences of our actions are never entirely predictable, and no matter how good our knowledge, there is never an objective "right" decision. This paradox is critical to successfully fostering and practicing adaptive leadership by being conscious of and comfortable with this paradox."

Habits of mind/practices that promote patterns of healthy respect for the restraint/action paradox include:

Decisiveness/willingness to act under tension

• Encourage courage. Cultivate an awareness of the natural inclination to avoid discomfort and have the courage to push beyond it and seize the "just do it" moment.
• Embrace provisionality: When we have to decide in the apparent absence of the necessary information, accept that it is likely to be imperfect and that it will be provisional at best.
• Do not be afraid of intelligent mistakes. Mistakes lead to learning.
• Avoid paralysis from the natural anxiety response to uncertainty. Accept that there is no one right place to start or end. Take the next best (fit-for-context) action that makes sense here and now.
• Act small and local. If possible, avoid large, system-wide interventions. One certainty in complexity is that any action can (and often does) lead to unintended consequences.

Restraint under tension

• Embrace liminality and avoid premature convergence — avoid being too quick to make judgments and choices.
• Avoid overconfidence to take action in a data-driven "predict and act" mode.
• Allow the "seeds of action" that you've sown time to germinate. Resist impatience and the need for an instant response.
• Keep options on the table long past their apparent usefulness. Many will find context later in the process.
• Know when to rest. Open and participatory engagement exposes vulnerabilities, requires humility, and takes energy.

These three frames of mind are interdependent, with openness as the most critical one of the three as it can enable or constrain the others. To some extent, adequate situational awareness is not possible without openness to diverse perspectives. In a complex system, one cannot afford a one-sided view. Knowing when to act and when to practice restraint depends on one's awareness of changing dynamics in the system, but it also requires openness to the unexpected.

In this paper, we didn't touch on Lightness (the L in COOL). In retrospect, that was a serious oversight. Lightness brings playfulness, the ability to hold our egos lightly enough to try and learn (and sometimes seem foolish while doing so). It also brings humor and appreciation of beauty, a highly needed restorative balm when we feel overwhelmed by the complexity we face.  

References:

• Rogers, K. H., R. Luton, H. Biggs, R. Biggs, S. Blignaut, A. G. Choles, C. G. Palmer, and P. Tangwe. (2013). Fostering complexity thinking in action research for change in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 18(2): 31. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05330-180231
• Cilliers, F. P. (2006). On the importance of a certain slowness. Emergence: Complexity and Understanding 8:106–113.
• Morin, E. (2008). On complexity. Hampton Press, New Jersey, USA.